The gameoverse pilot isn’t bad but it’s not good. It’s very mixed. The male characters outshine the female protagonist by a landslide
I was on Newgrounds but my fandom remained tied to the Henry Stickmin and Tactical Assassin side of the site. These really hyped animations were not my thing. I was around for .... I literally forgot the name Homestuck for a moment. So that tells you how much I cared about these popular projects at the time.
I was on CoolMathGames that absolutely were not cool math games lol.
But I am genuinely not surprised it is underwhelming. The creator gave off Vivziepop vibes of pitching to mainstream media platforms with a show that very clearly felt undercooked with an obsessive passion that the creator held onto for the last 13 years with thick nostalgia glasses.
You aren't going to see why these ideas don't work when changing formats when you don't take a step back from the project. There is a reason for the saying "kill your darlings".
So am I surprised GameOververse went the way of its literal predecessor? No. I'm surprised by the amount of people who didn't learn anything from the Homestuck pilot or even Hazbin Hotel.
This is not how I would have approached this sort of project, I get GLITCH is indie and with indie comes freedom that results in failures at times. But anything banking on nostalgia in the current time is fighting uphill. These were Millennial staples for us growing up and most of us grew out of them or grew larger than them. Sticking too close to outdated tropes, themes, humor and writing is not going to work long term.
Gen Z sees millennial culture as cringe because we were all about obscene passion. But in the current socio-political and economic global climate, nostalgia is not appreciated like it used to be. Nostalgia is not the warm and fuzzies right now. It's something between resentment and grief. And I think these old IPs will need to update to modern times and the modern media climate if they actually want to be seen as anything more than the unopened jolly rancher between the couch cushions from 2013.
